Word: chucked
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When the fuel was gone (it lasts only 2½ minutes at full power), the X-1 slowed down and was back on the other side of sound's great wall. Chuck scavenged the last of the dangerous oxygen and alcohol from the system by flushing it with nitrogen. Then he began the long glide to earth, listening to the clock ticking on the instrument panel. He somehow found this "awful boring," he says, and welcomed his spurt of interest when he landed the X-1 at close to 165 miles an hour and rolled to a stop...
...Wringing-Out. Chuck's X-1, like all modern aircraft, was first tested while still on the drawing boards. Some manufacturers make scale models of their new airplanes and drop them from high altitudes. As they streak down to destruction, telemetering instruments report their performance by radio. After the airplane itself is assembled, the "contractor's" test pilots have the ticklish job of easing it into the air. In the case of high-speed aircraft, this is generally done at Muroc; civilian pilots like the field as much as the Air Force does. Untested aircraft are shipped...
...Colonel Boyd, a strict but much-beloved "Old Man," is there a great deal. His pilots testify that "he does everything we do" and he is one of the six Air Force men who have flown faster than sound in the X-1.* ("The Old Man did fine," says Chuck.) In 1947, Test Pilot Boyd also set a new world's speed record (623.8 m.p.h.) over Muroc Lake in a specially built F-80 (TIME, June...
...Chuck Yeager, Major Cardenas (Chuck's C.O. as well as the pilot who takes the X-1 aloft), and Flight Engineer Jackie Ridley are permanent at Muroc. The X-1 is not a transient project but the Air Force's first "research airplane," and it needs both Muroc's room and its walled-off secrecy. The X-1 was never intended as an "operational airplane"; it is more like a flying wind tunnel. Its big advantage is that its rockets, which produce a thrust of 6,000 Ibs., are not weakened, like "air-breathing" engines, by high...
...flown "hundreds of miles" faster than sound. It has probably flown above Mach 2 (1,324 m.p.h. in the cold upper atmosphere) and reached a height above 60,000 ft., a record for airplanes. The big secret - what happens as it passes Mach 1 -is well kept. Chuck has been so carefully coached on this detail that he knows how to ward off questions before they are asked. Possibly something dramatic happens. It would be just as dramatic, perhaps more so, if nothing at all happens...